


The Brothers Three

by Reymonkey



Category: Lawless (2012)
Genre: Animal Transformation, Backwoods mythology, Complete, F/M, Lycanthropy maybe?, Mostly Canon Compliant, Not romance-heavy, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-03 03:38:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13332705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reymonkey/pseuds/Reymonkey
Summary: Maggie Beauford knew that there was something very different about the Bondurant brothers, but she did not know just how different until she saw it firsthand.





	The Brothers Three

**Author's Note:**

> I've been reading a lot of old folktales/fairie tales lately so that probably influenced this idea. The whole concept came to my mind pretty much complete, and I sort of feel like it stands alone fine without any deeper explanation. The Bondurants are what they are, and they earn their status as legends.

The Bondurants were very, very good to Maggie, and in light of that she was usually willing to overlook their peculiarities.  
She knew that there was something very different about them, but she did not have an inkling just how very different they were until she saw it firsthand.  
Some nights after close, Howard and Jack and Cricket and Danny were all busy elsewhere, and it was just her and Forrest alone together. Maggie treasured those nights, with the radio on low and Forrest working at dishes, wearing the faded apron that had probably belonged to their mother and looked ridiculously small on his broad frame. He had locked the front door behind the last customer, but as she was wiping down the tables there was a scratching at the back porch. Both of them looked up, at the sound. It had gone past midnight, a while ago, and anyone trying to come in the back way at this ugly hour of the morning was suspicious. After a moment Forrest went up the short hall to check, one hand in the pocket of his cardigan.  
He returned a moment later, scowling heavily, and in his wake trotted a lean and rangy wolf.

Maggie gasped in fear, and took a step to put a table between herself and the wild beast. To say that the wolf trotted might have been inaccurate. The beast loped and staggered a little, and swayed, but it kept as near to Forrest as a tame old hound. For his part Forrest did not look at all alarmed, but her was definitely unhappy with the situation, and his gaze strayed from the grey shaggy creature to Maggie.  
The wolf paid her no mind, but loped on towards the little wood stove that heated the big downstairs dining room, and collapsed bonelessly in front of it to bask in the lingering heat.   
Forrest scowled. “You… can go on up to bed, Maggie.”  
She stared. If he had a tame wolf as some kind of pet, how could she not have known until now? If it wasn’t a tame pet wolf, then how could he be so unperturbed by its presence here now?  
Ambling over, Forrest prodded the wolf with his boot, eliciting a kind of grumbling whine. Clearly the wolf had chosen a comfortable sleeping spot for the night, and didn’t want to be disturbed. Forrest heaved a quiet sigh, and nodded again at Maggie. “I’ll stay in here. You go on to bed, now.”  
She’d heard him use that tone before, the one that showed how accustomed he was to acting as a kind of mother figure for his brothers. If she pushed back at his order, possibly he wouldn’t take it the same way he did when Jack or Howard did, but he was definitely used to being obeyed.

Maggie nodded, and went on up to bed. She slept very fitfully, but she never did hear Forrest come upstairs so he was true to his word. In the morning she came down very early, to find Forrest working on making up a batch of biscuits for their breakfast shift as he often did.   
Sprawled on the wooden floor in front of the stove, a blanket tossed over him and boots still muddy, Howard lay snoring.

She was a city girl, with no grounding of the rural mysticism that haunted the back woods, but Maggie could put two and two together. Forrest gave her a measuring look, when he saw her putting the pieces together, but he said nothing about it so she said nothing about it. He seemed relieved that she didn’t ask, and by now she was used to his quiet ways, so they went on as if nothing had happened. When the first customers came in, Forrest shoved Howard awake, pushed a cup of coffee into his hands, and that was that.  
Maggie didn’t say anything, but she thought plenty. Was it Howard alone that suffered this affliction, or did his other brothers share it? It was not so hard to picture Forrest as a massive wolf, a den mother and pack leader. Certainly the brothers acted like some kind of a pack, close-knit and close-mouthed, always ready to brawl with each other but also deeply devoted to covering each other’s backs from any outside threat. Jack didn’t strike her as wolflike, though, and she had trouble wrapping her brain around the idea. Then too was the question of why, if they were all werewolves, would they not use the inevitable advantages in a pinch?   
The night that Forrest had his throat cut was one of the most terrifying experiences of her life. If Forrest had the ability to change into a wolf, why would he not have changed that night? Had they come up on him too fast for him to turn and rip out their throats as he rightfully should have? Why not attack their enemies quietly in the night as a trio, and leave the law to dismiss that act of justice or revenge as a random animal attack? Perhaps it was Howard alone who bore the curse, instead, and his brothers tactfully kept him in line while keeping the whole thing quiet.  
She wondered, and looked for clues, and found no answers.

There was no clear pattern to the episodes of Howard appearing as a wolf. Maggie looked for patterns, in the phases of the moon, but months went by with no clear signs of his transformation. He did not seem to behave any differently one time of month versus another, and the only consistency at all was that he only seemed foolish enough to come home while Maggie was there if he was also clearly drunk. On one occasion he actually noticed her, and hung his head and moved behind Forrest’s legs in a way that communicated sheepishness despite his inebriation. By then Forrest seemed aware that she knew it was Howard, and he just snorted and gave him a light shove away and went back to washing dishes.  
Howard’s occasional appearances as a wolf became simply a part of living with the odd family that was the Bondurants, and Maggie was used to it.

There were plenty of times when the station was quiet, and she wasn’t expected to work. One afternoon she came back from shopping to find Jack seated with his leg up on a chair, pantsleg rolled up and Forrest hunched over it. They’d been talking, she was sure, but fell quiet when she came in, and Jack gave her a polite nod and a strained smile. There was sweat on his face, and a jar of moonshine at his elbow, less than half full. She caught a glimpse of needle and thread, in Forrest’s hands, and after a brief questioning they gave her assurances Jack would be fine. It was ‘just a scratch’, and would heal up just fine. She took her shopping on up, but paused at the top of the stairs, ears straining.

“...Wasn’t gonna take nothing, you know. Definitely not chickens.” Jack’s tone was sulky, pitched low probably out of concern she might hear.

“We know what hen you was after.” Forrest rumbled in reply, quietly aggravated.

The snorting noise that followed, she was certain, was Howard almost choking on his coffee trying not to laugh.

The men who frequented the station liked to talk gossip, especially the older ones, so it was through them that she heard the story. On the Minnix farm, the preacher had seen a fox escaping right through a kitchen window. What the creature had been doing inside his house was anybody’s guess, but he had managed to throw a knife at the animal as it fled, and he was certain he’d at least wounded it in the leg.

Every detail fit perfectly into place, but it gave Maggie even more questions than answers. If Jack was a wolf, could he possibly be so small a wolf as to be mistaken for a fox? While he was definitely smaller than his larger than life brothers, Jack wasn’t a puny figure, either. It seemed unlikely anyone could get a fox and a wolf mixed up, but then that meant he was not the same as Howard but something of a similar nature but a different shape altogether.  
What did that mean for Forrest?

Trouble was growing, and there were other things to worry about besides the bestial mythology of her friends and protectors. She could see it coming, and when it exploded in a flurry of vengeance spurred by Jack, Maggie found herself sorry she had fallen on with them at all. She made a speech to Forrest, and he looked deeply distressed, but still he left. She had known that he would, because whatever his feelings were for her, his pack, his brothers, came first. He had a duty to try to protect them, even if the attempt left him bleeding and riddled with bullet holes.

A wolf, she reflected, was probably even more likely to be shot at than a man.

As soon as Forrest was able to get up on his feet, he did, checking himself out of the hospital against doctor’s orders but probably also to their relief. Forrest was not a good patient, and one they’d seen too much of in one year. He immediately apologized to Maggie, his words few but heartfelt, and she accepted the apology with no illusions about the kind of man she was living with. Somewhere under the placid surface that Forrest displayed roamed a fierce but loyal beast, and she loved both these qualities.

The effects of the bullet wounds were lasting, unfortunately, and home at the station Forrest shuffled around in pain. He took the medicines the doctors had prescribed him, quietly and with deep annoyance, but even with them he was stiff and slow. Howard was not wholly reformed, but seemed to be drinking less and sticking around more, to do the harder labor that was too much for Forrest in his injured state. Jack recovered faster, and seemed to have gained a little caution and common sense from his wound. He vexed Forrest less, and proved his honest intentions by focusing on restoring the family farm as a homestead to provide for himself and Bertha Minnix. As fall turned to winter, Forrest continued to struggle, and he was annoyed at being prevented from harder work. Maggie and Howard and Jack all learned tactics for diverting him from tasks that might cause him to hurt himself worse, while keeping him occupied and feeling useful still, but it was a constant difficulty. He grumbled and rumbled, and shuffled around slower. The inactivity and the need to eat with his pain medications made him put on a little weight, which Maggie found she didn’t mind, but his quiet grumbling made her worry. Howard lightly told her not to mind Forrest, that he always hated winter anyways, and this was not his injuries so much as a seasonal aggravation that would pass.

Unfortunately it was a cold spring, winter clinging on longer than usual, although the first hints of green seemed to warm Forrest up a little. He was starting to move more easily, at least, but Maggie still took on chores she didn’t want him doing.in the mornings the station needed an early start in order to have breakfast ready by the time the first customers arrived, so it was in the dim pre-dawn light that the fires needed to be lit. Traditionally Forrest had been first up in the morning to do this work, but in the winter he’d been slower to rise, and she let him sleep. One morning she came down to light the stoves, and cursed herself for not noticing the night before that the stock of firewood was so low. There was plenty of wood piled up out back, at least, but as she was gathering the smaller logs in a basket Maggie found that she was not alone. 

There were two of them, and in the dark their faces were not clear but their weapons were, and Maggie had a terrible sense of deja vu. It seemed more likely they were there to rob the station, than that they meant to come for her, but her body had been collateral damage before. Forrest kept his money well hidden, so they weren’t likely to get much, but it was well rumored around the area that he must have plenty squirreled away somewhere. Perhaps they would go rougher with her if they didn’t find it. She truly did not know where Forrest hid the greater bulk of his savings, so the men were likely to be disappointed. She gripped a log, ready to swing at them, and acutely aware of what a clumsy weapon that was.

They leered at her, and crept closer, and as the men came almost in reach of somebody managing to hurt somebody else their eyes went wide. Maggie was aware of the massive bulk at her back, like a living wall of fur behind her, before she ever heard the roar. It was a grumbling growling bass noise that was not, in truth, all that very loud. Volume was not important when the sound was deep and menacing enough to rattle one’s back teeth and trigger some deep and ancient instincts that turned leg muscles to water.   
There was, actually, water running down at least one of the men’s legs, which she knew because the stink of urine suddenly hit the air. In the pale blue light of morning, the men’s faces turned white, and their weapons dropped from slack hands. The man nearest to her was the first to flee, and he stumbled and fell on his face barely a yard later, then continued to scramble away on hands and knees for a bit before he was able to find his feet again.  
Maggie barely turned, and mostly just looked up, to glimpse the face of the bear that looked behind her, reared up on hind legs and each paw a weapon full of claws longer than her own fingers. From where she stood, below the towering beast, she could see the line of the scar in the fur, straight across the bear’s throat.   
The second man made a strangled noise that drew her attention, and then he too ran for his life. Heart thumping in her chest, Maggie carefully put down the log, stepped forward, and collected the knife and gun they had dropped in last year’s scrubby grass. The green shoots of new blades coming up between the old brown tickled her hand as she picked them up.

When she turned around, Forrest was looking slightly cross, hands in his cardigan pockets. “That’s enough firewood for now. C’mon inside. It’s cold.”

She offered him the weapons, which vanished into his pockets, and then he helped her carry the basket of firewood safe inside.


End file.
